Do you ever get creatively frustrated in your songwriting? Do you ever feel like you get stuck and don't know how to finish? Or start writing without even fully knowing what your song is about? Do you ever feel like you just plain suck at songwriting?

You're not alone, my friend. We've all been there. But, before you throw your guitar across the room and tweet about how "adulting is hard", read this. I want to help you.

In my last blog post, I discussed ways to write several songs at once and how to keep them from all sounding the same. Today I'll talk about writing a lyric with a singular emotion quickly. [Scroll to the bottom if you'd like to hear a finished product of something we did last week.]

One of the few remaining lucrative frontiers in songwriting and production is for film and TV licensing. Not only do films and TV shows need songs for IN the shows, they also need songs for the advertisements ABOUT the TV shows. Each of these contexts has special requirements lyrically and musically. Today I'm going to specifically talk about the types of lyrics that are appropriate for use in an advertisement for a TV show...

What if you have to write several uniquely different songs in a short period of time? How do you keep them from all sounding too similar? How do you create contrast from one song to the next? Ellen Tift talks about various songwriting techniques to keep things interesting.

This month's release is the final installment in our Year of the Groove [where we've put out one electronic music release a month for a year,] and what a year it has been! As much as I'm tempted to launch into a recap of the Year of the Groove, that is for another blog post. Today is all about this month's maxi single "Make Me Free". Giddyup!

I'm excited to tell the story behind this song because the past two months' singles had much different inceptions than this release. Instead of writing to someone else's target given for a pitch opportunity and having to crank it out in a couple of days, this song came to be through the more artistic and organically inspired path. I simply wrote it because I wanted to. It was something on my heart, the melody just "came to me" as the muse whispered it in my ear, and I documented what was forming in my head as I went about my days. I'm going to break it down into the various facets and talk about the reasons and creative process.

Last October our Year of the Groove release was the electropop song Supermodel Astronaut. At the time I'd posted my Supermodel Astronaut Manifesto blog entry, but at the advice of someone close to me, I ended up taking it down when we got Huffington Post coverage for the Supermodel Astronaut Challenge. I couldn't predict where the media would take it, and I didn't want my words to be misconstrued and scrutinized, and sometimes you just don't know how other people will perceive things. But now that the spotlight's not shining so brightly on this, I want my words to live because I believe that women being hard on themselves is just a reflection of how culture can be hard on females in general.